by David Brin
But it is said that every oxygen-breathing, starfaring clan is familiar with the shape of stacked rings, piled high, ominous and powerful.
When the traeki sneakship came, the g’Kek took one look at the newcomers and went into hiding for several generations, cowering in fright until, at last, they realised — these were different rings.
When qheuen settlers saw them already here, they very nearly left again, without unloading or even landing their sneakship.
How came our beloved friends to have such a reputation to live down? How came they to be so different from those who still fly in space, using that awful name?
— Reflections on the Six, Ovoom Press, Year-of-Exile 1915
Asx
Either the invaders are trying to confuse us, or else there is something strange about them.
At first, their powers and knowledge appeared as one might expect — so far above us that we seem as brutish beasts. Dared we contrast our own meager wisdom, our simple ways, against their magnificent, unstoppable machines, their healing arts, and especially the erudition of their piercing questions about Jijoan life? Erudition showing the vast sweep and depth of records at their command, surely copied from the final survey of this world, a million years ago. Yet…
They seem to know nothing about lorniks or zookirs.
They cannot hide their excitement, upon measuring specimen glavers, as if they have made a great discovery.
They make puzzling, nonsensical remarks concerning chimpanzees.
And now they want to know everything about mulc-spiders, asking naive questions that even this inexpert stack of manicolored rings could answer. Even if all of our/my toruses of sapiency were vlenned away, leaving nothing but instinct, memory, and momentum.
The sigil of the Great Library was missing from the bow of the great vessel that left their station here. We thought its absence a mere emblem of criminality. A negative symbol, denoting a kind of skulking shame.
Can it mean more than that? Much more?
Sara
Orom Engril’s shop on Pimmin Canal, it was but a short walk to the clinic where Pzora had taken the Stranger yesterday. Engril agreed to meet Sara there with Bloor the Portraitist. Time was short. Perhaps Sara’s idea was foolish or impractical, but there would be no better moment to broach it, and no better person to present it to than Ariana Foo.
A decision had to be made. So far, the omens weren’t good.
The emissaries from Dolo Village had gathered last night, in a tavern near the Urrish Quarter, to discuss what each of them had learned since the Hauph-woa docked. Sara showed a copy of the sages’ report, fresh from Engril’s copy shop, expecting it to shock the others. But by that evening even Pzora knew most of the story.
“I see three possibilities,” the stern-browed farmer Jop had said, nursing a mug of sour buttermilk. “First — the story’s an Egg-cursed lie. The ship really is from the great Institutes, we’re about to be judged as the Scrolls say, but the sages are spreading a pebble-in-my-hoof fable about bandits to justify musterin’ the militia, preparin’ for a fight.”
“That’s absurd!” Sara had complained.
“Oh yeah? Then why’ve all the units been called up? Humans drilling in every village. Urrish cavalry wheelin’ in all directions, and the hoons oilin’ their old catapults, as if they could shoot down.a starship by hurlin’ rocks.” He shook his head. “What if the sages’ve got some fantasy about resisting? It wouldn’t be the first time leaders were driven mad by an approaching end to their days of petty power.”
“But what of these sketches?” asked the scriven-dancer, Fakoon. The g’Kek touched one of Engril’s reproductions, portraying a pair of humans dressed in one-piece suits, staring brazenly at sights both new to them and yet somehow pathetic in their eyes.
Jop shrugged. “Ridiculous on the face of it. What would humans be doin’ out here? When our ancestors left Earth on an aged thirdhand tub, not a single human scientist understood its workings. The folks back home couldn’t have caught up with galactic standard tech for another ten thousand years.”
Sara watched Blade and the hoon captain react with surprise. It was no secret, what Jop had said about human technology at the time of exile, but they must find it hard to picture. On Jijo, Earthlings were the engineers, the ones most often with answers.
“And who would want to ferfetrate such a hoax?” Ulgor asked, lowering her conical head. Sara read tension in the urs’s body stance. Uh-oh, she thought.
Jop smiled. “Why, maybe some bunch that sees opportunity, amid the chaos, to besmirch our honor and have one last chance at revenge before Judgment Day.”
Human and urs faced each other, each grinning a bright display of teeth — which could be taken equivocally as either friendly or threatening. For once, Sara blessed the sickness that had caused nearly everyone’s rewq to curl up and hibernate. There would have been no ambiguity with symbionts to translate he meaning in Jop’s and Ulgor’s hearts.
At that moment, a squirt of pinkish steam jetted between the two — a swirling fume of cloying sweetness. Jop and Ulgor retreated from the cloud in opposite directions, covering their noses.
“Oops, i express repentance on our/my behalf. This pile’s digestive torus still retains, processes, deletes the richness of esteemed hoonish shipboard fare.”
Unperturbed, the captain of the Hauph-woa said — “How fortunate for you, Pzora. As to the subject at hand, we must still decide what advice to send back to Dolo Village and the settlements of the Upper Roney. So let me ask Jop… Hrrrm — what if we consider a simpler theory — there is no hoax by the honored sages, hrr?”
Jop still waved the air in front of his face, coughing. “That brings us to possibility number two-that we are being tested. The Day has come at last, but the noble Galactics are undecided what to do with us. Maybe the great Institutes hired human actors to play this role, offering us a chance to tip the scales one way through right action, or the other by choosing incorrectly. As for what advice we send upriver, I say we counsel that demolition should proceed according to the ancient plan!”
Blade, the young qheuen delegate, reared back on three legs, lifting his blue carapace, stammering and hissing so that his initial attempts at Anglic came out garbled. He switched to Galactic Two.
“Madness you betray! This (lunatic) thing, how can you say? Our mighty dam (glorious to see and smell) must fall? For what reason, if our (illicit) existence on Jijo he already known?”
Jop explained, “True, we can’t hide our crime of colonization. But we can start the process of removing our works from this scarred world. By showing our good intentions, we’ll prove we merit leniency.
“What we must not do — and I fear our sages may be fooled — is offer any cooperation to these humans who pretend to be gene raiders. No bribes or service, since that, too, must be part of the test.”
Ulgor snorted doubt. “And fossivility three? What if they turn out to ve felons, after all?”
Jop had shrugged. “Then the same answer holds. Passive resistance. Fade into the countryside. Tear down our cities—”
“Burn the libraries,” Sara cut in, and Jop glanced her way, then nodded, curtly.
“Above all else. They are the roots of conceit. Our outrageous pretense at remaining civilized.” He waved around him at the old Buyur chamber that had been converted to a tavern, the soot-stained walls adorned with spears, shields, and other souvenirs of the bloody siege of Tarek Town. “Civilized!” Jop laughed again. “We’re like parrot-ticks, reciting verses we do not understand, pathetically miming the ways of the mighty. If pirates have indeed come, such vanities can only lessen our skill at burrowing down. Our only chance of survival will be to blend in with Jijo’s animals. To become the innocents that glavers are, in their blessed salvation. A salvation we might have achieved by now, had humans not foiled nature with our so-called Great Printing.
“So you see it does not matter,” he concluded with a shrug of finality. “Whether the
visitors from space are noble chancellors from the Institute of Migration or the foulest criminals to prowl space. Either way, they are our judgment, come at last. Our sole option remains the same.”
Shaking her head in bemusement, Sara had commented, “You’re starting to sound like Lark.”
But Jop saw nothing ironic in that. His radicalization had intensified each day since the deafening, terrifying specter shook the tree farms, leaving trails of noise and heat that seared the sky.
“This is a bad thing,” Blade had said to Sara, later that evening, after Jop left to meet friends and fellow believers. “He seems sure of his reasoning and virtue — like a gray queen, unshakably convinced of her righteousness.”
“Self-righteousness is a plague that afflicts all races, except the traeki,” answered Fakoon, bowing two stalks toward Pzora. “Your folk are lucky to be spared the curse of egotism.”
The Dolo Village pharmacist had vented a soft sigh. “i/we urge you to make no simple assumptions, dear comrades. It is said that we, too, once possessed that talent, whose partner is the gift/curse of ambition. To excise it from our natures meant leaving behind some of our greatest treasures, our finest rings. It must not have been an easy thing to do.
“One of the things we/i fear most about restored contact with Galactics is something you other species and beings may. not understand-we fear temptation by an enticing offer.
“We fear an offer to be made whole.”
The clinic was a place of wheels — of g’Kek surgeons and patients on push-chairs. Many of the traeki pharmacists used skooter-wagons, pushing along faster than most could walk alone. No wonder the smooth planarity of city life appealed to two of the Six.
The Stranger’s room was on the fifth floor, looking out across the confluence of the rivers Roney and Bibur. Both steam ferries could be seen moored under screening arbors, now operating only at night, since vigilante groups had threatened to burn them if they budged by day. And this morning confirming word came down from the Glade. The High Sages, too, wanted no unnecessary signs of technology revealed by the Six. Destroy nothing. Conceal everything.
It only added to a growing sense of confusion among common folk. Was this Judgment Day or not? Sounds of raucous argument were heard in all parts of town. We need some goal to unite us, Sara thought, or we’ll start coming apart, skin and pelt, shell and spokes.
A traeki attendant motioned Sara through to the private chamber that had been given the Stranger. The dark man looked up when she entered, and smiled with clear delight to see her. He laid aside a pencil and pad of pale paper, on which Sara glimpsed the scene outside the window-one of the steam ferries, outlined with subtle countershading. Pinned to the wall was another sketch depicting the shipboard concert on the fantail of the Hauph-woa, capturing a gentle interlude amid the storm of crisis.
“Thank you for coming,” said an elderly, sallow-faced woman seated by the Stranger’s bedside, looking surprisingly like a g’Kek, in coloration, her startling blue eyes, and also the way a wheelchair framed her blanket-shrouded form. “We have been making progress, but there are some things I wanted to try only after you arrived.”
Sara still wondered why Ariana Foo, of all people, had taken an interest in the wounded man. With Lester Cambel and most other sages away, she was the highest ranking human savant left this side of Biblos. One might expect her to have more urgent things on her mind right now, than focusing her keen intellect on the problem of the Stranger’s origins.
The g’Kek doctor rolled forward, his voice mellow, with a cultured accent.
“First, Sara, please tell us — have you recalled anything further about our patient’s aspect, the day you pulled him from the swamp all burned and torn?”
She shook her head silently.
“His clothing, none was recovered?”
“There were a few scraps, mostly charred. We threw them out while treating his burns.”
“Did those scraps go to dross barrels?” he asked eagerly. “Those very barrels aboard the Hauph-woa right now?”
“There were no ornaments or buttons, if that’s what you’re looking for. The scraps went to recycling, which in the case of old cloth means going straight to my father’s pulping machine. Would they have helped?”
“Perhaps,” answered the old woman, clearly disappointed. “We try to consider all possibilities.”
The Stranger’s hands lay folded on his lap, and his eyes darted back and forth, focusing on faces as if he were fascinated not by words but the sounds themselves.
“Can” — she swallowed — “can you do anything for him?”
“That depends,” the doctor replied. “All burns and contusions are healing well. But our finest unguents are useless against structural damage. Our enigmatic guest has lost part of his left temporal lobe, as though it had been torn out by some horrid predator. I am sure you know this area is where you humans process speech.”
“Is there any chance—”
“Of recovering what he has lost?” A g’Kek shrug, twining two eyestalks, had never became fashionable among the other races. “If he were very young or female, there might be some transfer of speech facility to the right lobe. A few stroke victims do this. But the feat is rare for adult males, whose brain structures are more rigid, alas.”
The light in the dark Stranger’s eyes was deceptive. He smiled amiably, as if they were discussing the weather. His reliable cheerfulness tore at Sara’s heart.
“Nothing can be done?”
“Out in the Galaxy, perhaps.”
It was an old expression, almost habitual, whenever one hit the limits of the crude arts available on the Slope.
“But we can do no more. Not in this place.”
There was something in the doctor’s tone. All four eyes stared inward — as if a human being were studying his fingernails, waiting for someone else to say the unspoken. Sara looked to Ariana Foo, whose face was composed.
Too composed. Sara leaped on the doctor’s hanging implication.
“You can’t be serious.”
The sage briefly closed her eyes. When they reopened, there was a daring glitter.
“Word comes down that our invaders are plying mass opinion, winning converts with drugs, potions, and miracle cures. Already, unsanctioned caravans of the sick and lame have set out from Tarek and other sites, hobbling up the hard trails in desperate search of remedies. I admit, the thought even crossed my mind.” She lifted her stick-thin arms from her fragile body. “Many may die on the trek, but what matters such risk against the lure of hope?”
Sara paused. “Do you think the outsiders can help him?”
Ariana shrugged in the hoonish manner, with a puff of air in her cheeks. “Who can say? Frankly, I doubt even Galactics could repair such damage. But they may have palliatives to improve his lot. Anyway, all bets are off if my suspicion is true.”
“What suspicion?”
“That our Stranger is no poor savage at all.”
Sara stared, then blinked. “Ifni,” she breathed.
“Indeed.” Ariana Foo nodded. “Shall we see if our guest truly was delivered to us by our goddess of luck and change?”
Sara could barely manage a nod. While the old woman rummaged in her valise, Sara pondered. This must be why everyone was in awe of her, when she was chief human sage before Cambel. They say genius is a knack for seeing the obvious. Now I know it’s true.
How could I have been so blind!
Ariana took up several of the sheets recently copied on Engril’s machine. “I thought of asking a Sensitive to sit in, but if I am right, we’ll want this kept quiet. So we’ll make do by watching how he reacts. Note that he is probably the only person in Tarek Town who has not seen these yet. Everybody pay close attention, please.”
She rolled closer to the patient, who watched attentively as Ariana laid a single sheet on the coverlet.
His smile gradually thinned as he picked up the drawing, touching the fine expert lines. Mountains fra
med a bowllike vale littered with shattered trees — nest lining for a thick javelin, adorned with jutting spines, whose contours Sara had first seen hurtling above her shaken home. Fingertips traced the sloping curves, trembling. The smile was gone, replaced by a look of agonized perplexity. Sara sensed that he was trying to remember something. Clearly there was familiarity here, and more, much more.
The Stranger looked up at Ariana Foo, eyes filled with pain and questions he could not pose.
“What can this prove?” Sara asked, writhing inside.
“He finds the image of the ship troubling,” Ariana answered.
“As it would any thoughtful member of the Six,” Sara pointed out.
The older woman nodded. “I had expected a happier response.”
“You think he’s one of them, don’t you?” Sara asked. “You think he crashed into the swamp east of Dolo, aboard some kind of flying machine. He’s a Galactic. A criminal.”
“It seemed the simplest hypothesis, given the coincidence in timing — a total stranger, burned amid a humid swamp, appearing with injuries unlike anything our doctors have seen. Let’s try another one.”
The next sketch showed the same little valley, but with the starship replaced by what the sages called a “research station,” assigned the task of analyzing Jijoan life. The Stranger peered at the black cube, intrigued and perhaps a little frightened.
Finally, Ariana presented a drawing showing two figures with strong, confident faces. A pair who had come a hundred thousand light-years to plunder.
This time a sharp gasp escaped him. The Stranger stared at the human forms, touching the symbol-patches on their one-piece exploration suits. It did not require fey sensitivity to read despair in his eyes. With an incoherent cry, he crumpled the sketch and flung it across the room, then covered his eyes with an arm.
“Interesting. Very interesting,” Ariana murmured.
“I fail to understand,” the doctor sighed. “Does this mean he is from off-Jijo or not?”
